57 pages • 1 hour read
Edward BellamyLooking Backward
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1888A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Utopian Concepts as a Way to Motivate Change
Content Warning: The novel harbors offensive ideas about gender and race. It uses dated language to describe people of color and assumes essential differences between men and women in its description of a utopian society. It describes a utopian society in which men hold all major leadership positions, reinforcing a patriarchal view of society. It also suggests that women are romantically interchangeable. It presents a utopian society that has a specific religious leaning and does not favor religious pluralism. It advocates for a utopian society that is patriarchal, misogynistic, trans-exclusive, racist, ableist, imperialistic, heteronormative and implicitly anti-gay, and classist. The novel advocates for a brand of nationalism. It contains references to death by suicide.
Utopian fiction is a genre as old as Western civilization. Some classic examples include Plato’s The Republic (375 BCE), Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), and Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872). Utopian fiction invents a world that is completely aligned with the author’s ethos. In the context of the fictional work, every utopian society is perfect. As such, utopias fall into two categories: science fiction, in which a perfect society is imagined to exist in a newly discovered land or in the far future; or 
